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Eclipse is slow to begin with on a quad-core, 12GB Windows 8 computer. It slows down to a crawling speed over time even for a simple activity such as opening a file. Restarting Eclipse restores its initial performance.

Is there a way to prevent its performance deterioration over time without restarting it?

I use Eclipse for Android app development

Added: The following is the content of the eclipse.ini:

-startup
plugins/org.eclipse.equinox.launcher_1.3.0.v20120522-1813.jar
--launcher.library
plugins/org.eclipse.equinox.launcher.win32.win32.x86_64_1.1.200.v20120522-1813
-product
org.eclipse.epp.package.java.product
--launcher.defaultAction
openFile
--launcher.XXMaxPermSize
256M
-showsplash
org.eclipse.platform
--launcher.XXMaxPermSize
256m
--launcher.defaultAction
openFile
-vmargs
-Dosgi.requiredJavaVersion=1.5
-Dhelp.lucene.tokenizer=standard
-Xms40m
-Xmx1024m
Hong
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    depends on which extensions/plugins are installed, one of them probably causes a memory leak... BTW, eclipse is slow (even when everything works fine) - that's why I prefer IntelliJ or Netbeans. – Nir Alfasi Jan 14 '13 at 18:33
  • What time frame are we talking about here? I've noticed a deterioration on mine after a week or so uptime, but that's hardly something to complain about. If you mean an hour or so, that's something else completely. – Geobits Jan 14 '13 at 18:46
  • @Geobits, I was talking about a time frame of 24 hours or so. – Hong Jan 14 '13 at 18:54

1 Answers1

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I wonder if your eclipse memory settings are set too low. Even if your machine has lots of memory, if your settings are using the defaults, your Eclipse instance is probably not making use of all the resources available.

Here is a good SO question about this: What are the best JVM settings for Eclipse?

I don't have to close Eclipse very often, so I don't think this is normal behavior - especially on a machine with as much resources as you have.

Community
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Booger
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  • I deliberately increased Xmx from 512m to 1024m, and saw the performance improvement, but it slows to a crawling speed eventually. The memory used by Java Platform SE binary process usually goes from 500MB to about 900MB before I cannot bear it anymore, so restart Eclipse. – Hong Jan 14 '13 at 19:06
  • Did you follow the guidelines for modifying your settings. You need to modify min\max and heap all in concert for Java to handle memory correctly. If you have these ratios out of sync, you could have issues like you are describing. Again, I don't have the same experience on either my Mac or Windows machines. – Booger Jan 14 '13 at 19:08
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    I am using Eclipse (4.2) Juno, I am not sure which one I should follow. – Hong Jan 14 '13 at 19:22